Wednesday, 27 June 2012

That’s impossible!!

I give you the first impossible object that I’ve added to my
collection – a pair of playing cards from Angus Lavery ... and a little story
behind them.

Back at Easter, down in Devon, at James Dalgety’s Easter
Puzzle Party, I met an interesting fellow by the name of John Lavery. John is
the current organiser of the monthly gatherings of puzzlers and magicians at
Camden Lock (2nd Tuesday of the month – shout if you want the
details!) since Ray Bathke stepped down after organising them for several
years. I’d seen his name on the regular emails, but since I haven’t managed to
get down to one of the Camden Lock do’s yet, I hadn’t actually met him.

My introduction to John came as he was showing a couple of
us an album he’d put together to showcase brother Angus’ incredible
card-folding skills ... he was flicking through the album and taking the odd
card out and passing them around for closer inspection while he was telling
stories about the designs: Angus came up with this one in about fifteen minutes
after Christmas dinner one year – he disappeared into the kitchen and came out
with this – as he held up a complicated set of about five interconnected cards,
each with its own impossible fold, yet somehow appearing rather solidly
interlinked with the others.

Some would be dismissed with a comment about the particular design
losing quite a lot of material, so they don’t look as impressive – and others
would have something rather subtle about them that needed pointing out – at least
to the largely uninitiated, like myself. I’d come across impossible card-folding a
couple of times on my trawling around the internet – seen some pictures (mainly
trapdoor cards) and had to look at some of them a couple of times before I
realised what the impossible bit was (told you I was a philistine!).

I’d also come across a chapter in one of my puzzle books [Puzzlers
Tribute – A Feast for the Mind] on impossible card-folding by Luc de Smet – and
it showed how to create one class of impossible card, but apart from that, my
research (read: surfing!) has turned up very little else. From what I can gather, the
basic rules of impossible card-folding are: cutting and folding is allowed –
rejoining anything isn’t, so if it looks like it’s joined, it always has
been...

Anyway, back to John’s tour through Angus’ body of work –
and there’s one card in there that is totally mind-blowing: a standard sized
playing card with the Olympic Rings cut and folded so that each ring is half
cut-out and half folded-over card – except that all five rings are interlinked
wherever they overlap! Remember the rules? No rejoining, ever ... John told us
that this is one of Angus' harder designs and it has a non-trivial failure
rate – and looking at just how little material is left to keep the two halves
of the rings together, and trying to imagine the amount of folding and turning
inside out that these cards have to go through to get those rings interlinked –
that’s hardly surprising!

A couple of days later I got in touch with Angus and asked if
there was any chance he’d be prepared to make up a couple for me as “Thank-you”s
for a pair of puzzlers who’ve been rather kind to me, and who already have every-puzzling-thing
that I could imagine trying to give them – and I was very chuffed (and quite a bit
surprised – after all he didn’t know me from Adam and I was expecting a
reaction more along the lines of “I’d rather stick pins in my eye than go
through that again”) when he agreed
... and a few weeks later I received a well-packaged set of little picture
frames from Angus: three of his incredible Olympic Ring cards and a copy of his
very first impossible card design.

I’ve sat and stared at these cards for ages, and I reckon I’m
no closer to understanding how the heck they work than when I first saw one in
John’s album at Easter – truly impossible objects – courtesy of Angus Lavery’s incredible
card-folding wizardry!